


Go Back to Sleep

by rlficacct



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Episode: e060-066 The Stolen Century Parts 1-7, Gen, Nightmares
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-10
Updated: 2020-08-10
Packaged: 2021-03-05 20:33:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,300
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25831396
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rlficacct/pseuds/rlficacct
Summary: "I'm having trouble sleeping," he tells her. A pause. "Nightmares.""What about?" she asks, just like he was hoping she wouldn't. He's incapable of lying to her, unfortunately.
Relationships: Barry Bluejeans & Lup
Comments: 2
Kudos: 17





	Go Back to Sleep

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to my friend who gave me the Bardic Inspiration to work on this fic. Premise & title from a prompt list of 100 ways to say "I love you."

"I'm having trouble sleeping," he tells her. A pause. "Nightmares."

It's more than he's really comfortable sharing. It's only been three years - an interminable three years, true, a stretch that seems even longer to him than the five drawn-out years between when he graduated and finally found a job that actually felt right for him, but still. Thirty-six months. He likes the crew, but they're only just now starting to feel like something closer to friends than friendly coworkers, and what's troubling him is something he'd only talk to his innermost circle about.

Although, he supposes, technically Lup is part of his inner circle. Outer circle. All his circles.

What a strange, inexplicable situation they've found themselves in, he thinks, for the thousandth time.

It's more than he wants to share with her, but he hopes that the vulnerability he's showing will be enough to keep her from asking more questions, digging deeper. She always asks him things, anything, questions ranging from the silly to the mundane to the serious. He doesn't see her do it with the others, although once he noticed enough to start tracking, he realized she wasn't asking him personal questions in front of the group, either. Just when they were alone: in the lab, or in the kitchen when his early lunch and her late breakfast overlapped with each other but no-one else...

Or inside his tent in the middle of the night when they're on-world with Magnus, running a scouting mission for the Captain.

Why she's in his tent and not outside taking her turn as their lookout is a mystery. Knowing Lup as he does, he guesses she maybe saw his flashlight shining through the thinnish fabric of his tent and took it as an open invitation to pop in. Lup, he's discovered, has a tendency to go places she wants to be, invited or not. And now here she is, asking him why he's awake, sitting practically on top of his feet in the tiny space (another Lup-ism he's started getting used to over the past few years), and here he is, hoping that if he takes the chance and gives her a more honest answer than he's comfortable with, maybe he will fool her into thinking that's all there is, and she won't dig deeper, asking him questions that he truly doesn't want to answer.

Barry's father told him - years ago, as a young adult - never to gamble, because you'll always lose in the end. Barry always figured he'd meant that literally, but this metaphorical gamble also fails to pay off. Lup draws her knees up to her chest, wraps her arms around her legs, wiggles her feet until they're settled, over his blanket, between his. "What about?" she asks, just like he was hoping she wouldn't. He's incapable of lying to her, unfortunately.

He tries deflection: "Aren't you supposed to make sure nothing comes out here and eats us?" They're in a forest, still about a day's journey out from the town that is their destination. Magnus has been cheerfully contemplating the possibility of fighting a bear, and the image is kind of lodged in Barry's mind.

"Hmm," Lup muses. "I doubt that's going to happen, but... here. Let's do this." She turns around and scoots until she's sitting in the entryway to his tent and looking out at the dark forest around them. They've set the tents up against a short cliff, and from where she's seated she can maintain a good vantage point while still technically being inside. "Now, spill."

Outsmarted, Barry sighs. He pauses, no longer trying to avoid the question, but rather trying to figure out how to answer it. He waits too long, maybe, because Lup continues.

"When I was a really young kid, I used to have these nightmares all the time," she says. "Really bad, like, for a while there I was waking Taako up pretty much every night. I told him he should start sleeping somewhere else, but he wouldn't. At least he could go back to sleep pretty quickly after they were over. It'd take me ages. I was the sleepiest elf kid you've ever seen."

Barry stares at the roof of the tent, not quite sure what to do with that. He imagines a young Lup, even shorter than she is now, maybe waist height, yawning and scrubbing her eyes. He wonders if she's always had the irritated scowl that she gets when she hasn't had time to rest. It would have been quite the expression to see on a kid, if so.

"I didn't really have nightmares as a kid," he decides on. "Maybe if I had, I'd know how to deal with them now."

"It helped me to talk about them," Lup says. "Taako would listen. Sometimes, if I hadn't woken him up, I'd whisper to him what the dreams were about. It wouldn't keep me from having them in the first place, but usually it stopped me from having more later that night. I'd listen about yours, if you want."

And there she is again, poking at the spots that he wishes she would leave alone. She would if he asked, he's sure, but he doesn't know how to do that, either. Part of him doesn't _want_ her to stop doing it. It's hard to tell her these things, but it's worth it to see her absorbed in his stories about his family, to watch the crinkles in her eyes when he recounts embarrassing moments from his college years, for every time she casually references something about him that he'd only mentioned briefly, years ago.

"You might not want to," he tries. "It's not... just dreams. It's memories. Stuff that actually happened to us. I don't want to remind you of it, if it's not bothering you like it is me."

Lup twists around so he can see her face. "You mean that Thing that ate our home?" He nods and she narrows her eyes and her mouth turns downward slightly. She gives a small shake of her head.

"I'm _never_ going to forget about that," she says, her voice slightly rougher than normal. Then her face smooths out and she reaches behind her to touch his leg briefly before turning back to face outside. "You aren't going to remind me about anything that I don't already remember; I was there too. But not being able to talk about it is going to make it worse. Having to deal with something alone is always worse."

She sounds like she's speaking from experience. He's gathered, although she hasn't specifically told him this, that she and Taako relied on each other pretty heavily when they were younger. He wonders if she was ever separated from him, whether that's what's behind those words. Or maybe they just weren't always as close as they are now. That insight is maybe not something she wanted him to know. It makes it easier for him to try to articulate his nightmares.

"There's these two dreams that I have over and over," he begins with. "One is, we're on the Starblaster and we've just left home and we're sitting right outside the prime material plane. It's... it's so beautiful, Lup. I want us to be able to actually take our time and study it one day, because if it's even half as incredible as it is in my dreams... 

"Everything is going great and Lucretia's sitting on the deck writing about what it looks like in one journal and about what we're doing in the other. And Merle's laying right next to her flat on his back, taking everything in. And Captain Davenport is busy flying the ship and he asks Merle, 'Aren't you supposed to be doing something?' and Merle jokes that he's being Lucretia's eyes so she can interview him later, and besides, Magnus isn't doing anything either, which is true. And Taako's there and he's doing some sort of spell, and you and I are taking measurements and writing down observations and then...

"The radio turns on and everyone back on the ground is just screaming. And we can't even tell what they're saying for so long because of how chaotic is, but everything looks fine to us, we can't see what's happening, until something shakes the ship and the Captain just goes flying and then he's gone. And I have to steer the ship but obviously I don't know how to do that and again, we can't tell what's going on down there but I still... I make the decision to leave. And the screaming gets louder and louder until I wake up."

Even talking about it makes him feel anxious. Luckily that's not the dream that he had tonight, but even still he's shaking slightly. The dreams are bad in their own unique, awful ways, and this one always results in him panicking.

"The other one is... it's the one I just woke up from. It's newer; I started having it once we figured out how it works when that Thing devours a plane. But I'm sitting at my Dad's house with him. He's in his rocking chair and he's reading a book. And...

"I grew up out in the middle of nowhere. We had electricity, but sometimes it would go out for a while. And when it did, my dad would always make this joke. He'd look up and say, 'Looks like someone turned off the lights!' And I thought it was such a dumb joke at the time, but... in my dream, the color starts fading out of the room, and my dad looks at me and says that to me. And he makes this expression that he would do sometimes, a wink, almost, and then he's gone."

He's already cried over this dream tonight. Thankfully he had wiped the tears off his face before Lup showed up in his tent. But even so, he still has to draw a couple of shaky breaths just thinking about it. Lup must hear, it's dead quiet out, but she doesn't say anything.

Lup ducks her head. "I'm sorry. That's really rough. Would it help you to talk about him?"

"Maybe someday?" Barry replies. "But not now. It's too much."

"I get that," Lup says. "I'd be happy to hear about him one day. From what you've mentioned about him, he seems like a pretty good guy. I'm sorry you lost him."

"Thanks," Barry says. It feels very weird to be offered condolences by someone else whose entire life has also been destroyed.

"Is there anything I _can_ do for you? That would help?"

"You don't have to do that," he says.

"I know I don't have to," she replies. "I'm offering. Really."

Barry thinks about it. He's about to tell her no - there's nothing _she_ can do about his mind being messed up - but then an idea hits him. It's personal, but it's not like they haven't already blown past most of his walls tonight.

"Can I tell you something?" She nods, and he continues.

"I'm scared that- I already have these two nightmares that I get constantly. What if it takes us much longer than this to figure something out and I start getting more? I'm worried that the longer we do this, or maybe the more bad things we see or the more we learn about how that Thing works, my brain will start throwing worse and worse things at me. It's already hard enough to have these dreams almost every night." He's crying a little, now, and he knows it's audible in the tone of his voice. "I can't imagine what I'll do if it gets worse than this."

Lup's turned around again and now she's crawling back to be fully inside the tent. She reaches for his arm and he lets her pull him up into a sitting position. She puts her hand up to his face but pauses before actually touching him, waiting for him to nod slightly before wiping the tear tracks off his cheeks with her sleeve. She dabs gently at his eyes as well, then leans forward and gives him a hug, quick but solid, before gripping his shoulders tight and staring him in the eyes.

"We're not going to let that happen," she tells him firmly. "When we get back to the ship, we're going to talk to Taako and Merle. Between the two of them, someone has to know a spell that can help you sleep without nightmares. And in the meantime-" she breaks eye contact with him and looks skyward, sighing briefly before facing him again. "When you start thinking about that, remind yourself that the awful stuff isn't all there is. Think about those constellations we made up last year or... the waterfall we saw earlier today, remember how beautiful that was? Remember how soft all the animals were on that first planet we landed on?"

"It was a beautiful waterfall," Barry acknowledges.

"We'll stop longer on the way back, maybe we can go find the base. Barry. No matter how bad things get, okay, there will still be good things. And you'll always have us. Okay?"

Barry nods. "Okay."

"Okay," Lup nods back. "You need to get more rest if you can, though. Trust me, your first line of defense is sleeping when possible. And I'm going to be right out there-" she points her thumb over her shoulder "-if you need me."

"I've got next watch," Barry protests.

"Not tonight. I don't need sleep as much as you do. Remember, elf powers?" It's a joke that's been tossed around among the crew. Barry nods his acceptance, and Lup pushes him gently back to the ground, straightens the blanket back over him.

"Go back to sleep."


End file.
